From the Studio to the Field: André Breton’s ‘Hopi Notebook’

Abstract

André Breton’s visit to the Hopi villages of Arizona in 1945 had an impact on his view of the world and of the objects he collected.  His response to what he witnessed in the month when the United States dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was reflected in the notebook he kept on his trip, known as the “Hopi Notebook,” and in the poem he began writing that summer, “Ode to Charles Fourier.”  His belief in the liveliness of repurposed things, haunted by their former lives, was particularly pertinent to the Hopi katsina figures he collected on his trip to the American West and subsequently kept close to him in his apartments in New York and Paris.  These things had an impact on surrealist thought through the memories they stirred in him of the dances he had witnessed during his visit and recorded in the “Notebook” and the “Ode.” Breton’s “Hopi Notebook” adds a missing piece to our understanding of surrealism as the premier avant-garde movement of the twentieth century through the way Breton continued his effort to capture his evolving understanding of the objects he collected, his and their connection to their culture of original, and, through them, what it means to be human.